Sex in Canada: the expected and the surprising
With the provincial vs federal and Anglo vs Franco breakdown too (because of course)
— I’ve asterisked the hed to trick your spam filters, but they are getting stricter by the day so you’re probably reading this from your Spam/Junk folder, sorry. —
The analysis of the first big survey on what Canadians do in bed, with whom, and how frequently, will be out as a book with the UBC press on Valentines Day: Sex in Canada: The Who, Why, When, and How of Getting Down Up North by a McMaster University sociology professor Dr Tina Fetner (with research assistants).
Environics Canada pooled among its thousands of volunteer respondents and adjusted for regional, linguistic and sexual minority representation to create a viable sample for the McMaster researchers. Out of 3,368 eligible participants who started the survey, 2,303 completed it. The following percentages are based on those 2,303 people. The survey was completed in 2018, well before the pandemic that may or may not have introduced any radical changes in the 2018 numbers. Future surveys will show.
There’s something of a bug in the sampling that Dr Fetner reveals early on in the book. The questionnaire asked the biological sex question in the woke bureaucratese though still in a way that would result in useful information: “sex assigned at birth”, and in addition to that, “gender identity now”. (Sex, and the optional entry “gender, if different”, would have done the job better but I imagine the blowhards on the “ethics committee” not to mention graduate students and researchers’ colleagues would have vetoed the phrasing immediately.) About 1 percent of respondents chose trans and nonbinary gender options. What comes next is interesting: “When I report on gender breakdowns in this book,” writes Dr Fetner, “I am using the second of our two questions to capture the gender identity of participants. So, when I say “men”, this includes cisgender and transgender men. When I say “women”, this includes cisgender and transgender women.”
As you read the book, it’s very clear that the researcher knows perfectly well the difference between female and male bodies, and why this is important. Anatomy is discussed on a few occasions, and the words men and women there can’t have possibly included “both cisgender and transgender”. My guess is that she looked at the percentage of self-declared trans and nb respondents and decided that they were too low to mess up the bulk of the results so might as well group everyone by “gender identity” knowing full well that the results would be mostly about the two sexes. Well, maybe this was the case. Or maybe this grouping messed up the sexual orientation question, as we will see below.
Most of the women who identified as straight and who were currently in a relationship, Dr Fetner writes, had a male partner. But 1.9 percent reported that their partner is female. It’s wilder still among the men: among straight-identified men, 3.9 percent stated that their partner was male. Among lesbians, 3.7 percent reported that their partner was a man, and an incredible 6.5 percent of gay men said that they were currently dating women.
Dr Fetner proposes that sexuality has three aspects: sexual identity/orientation, sexual activity, and sexual desire. Not all of these will match, she says, and sometimes as we can see, gay men will partner with women and straight men with men. This tripartite concept I think is analytically very valuable, but given that the sex information of the participants has been collected messily, we can’t really tell how accurate these particular percentages are. I would bet that some of those lesbians “in relationships with men” are in relationships with trans men, that is, trans-identified females, and the same would probably go with gay men “in relationship with women”. The non-binary segment in the lesbian partner choice category is, happy to eat my shirt if wrong, all women who identify as enby.
The last few pages in the Sexual Identity chapter are the most speculative; the “LGBTQQIA Identities” section is just a wild ride. (But before that: “The framework for sexual identity that dominates Canadian culture - and the one that forms the basis of this book - cannot simply be imposed upon Indigenous traditions. For this reason, I do not attempt to describe the sexual lives of two-spirit or other Indigenous people.” Wait - so no Indigenous people responded to the questionnaire? This remains unclear - and if that’s the case, it’s unjustified. But it’s a shield from potential criticism by the university-based Indigenous apartness activists demanding different categories for everything.) There’s a short sections on “intersex identity” (which some people certainly may claim, but that is not a sexual orientation), “asexual identity” (ditto) and “pansexual identity” (“pansexuality is slightly different from bisexuality, in that it acknowledges those with nonbinary gender”...) Newer sexual identities such as a- and pan-sexuality, writes Dr Fetner, “expand the possibilities for understanding ourselves.” It remains to be seen if they will become embedded in our culture in the way that LGB identities have, she concludes. You can’t tell? You seriously can’t tell? Alright, onwards to the much better chapters.
How much sex are we having?
For the purposes of the survey, the researchers distinguish between sexual activity proper (involving genitals) and other forms of intimacy (like kissing, cuddling etc). This is I think useful and still within what I would call the broad “Dan Savage guidelines”, popularized by the well-known advice columnist, to include opposite and same sex activities. Some findings:
One third of Canadians went without partnered sex during the past year. (The French, incidentally, stand at one quarter and c’est un scandale.) To break that down further, 21 percent of Canadians have not had sex with anybody during last year but had been active before, and the remaining 11 percent have yet to have sex for the first time. There’s a variety of options on offer in the question on reasons for not having had partnered sex that’s interesting, which you can find in the book - as well as the info on “unpartnered sex”.
The remaining two-thirds of Canadian who reported having had sex in the last year with a human being are analyzed by age (as expected, highest percentages are the 30-39 plus-minus a decade, while over 50 percent of the 60-69s and just under 40 percent of the 70+ people are still sexually active), sexual orientation (some unsurprising numbers here about gay men) and marital status. The last one is interesting. There’s been a lot of talk in the culture about long relationships as desire killers, but among the surveyed, the greatest predictability factor to having had sex in the last month was - whether the respondent was partnered or single. “Over half of the married people in our survey (56 percent) had sex within the past month, compared to 35 percent of individuals who were unmarried… The rumour that singles spend more time in the bedroom than married people is just not accurate, which makes sense. Finding a partner takes time and effort, and perhaps also some good luck. Couples have already overcome this hurdle,” writes, sensibly, Dr Fetner.
Another myth is apparently put to rest: that parents of growing children are too tired, busy or bored to have regular sex. “85 percent of parents with children under age eighteen living at home reported having active, satisfying sexual lives” according to Sex in Canada survey. They were just as happy with their sex lives as people who do not have kids”. Parents also reported having more sex than non-parents.
Commitment, Casual Sex, and Cheating
This chapter looks at the marriage trends and how they’ve changed - back in 1970, for example, over 90 percent of Canadian women had been at some point or were married at the time of the census. Quebec used to have the highest numbers - 90 percent of its women were married in 1970 - whereas in 2011, 40 percent of Quebec couples were the cohabiting unmarrieds (I would bet the number is higher today). There are some important corrections of other sociological cliches - for instance, not every other, that’s a US stat, but 40 percent of marriages in Canada end in divorce and the “experts estimate that they are on the decline”. One of the reasons is that fewer people decide to marry in the first place, waiting until much later in life or living as common law partners.
A particularly interesting section is one on the rise of hook-up culture among the young and the mores of the hookup generation. There is an Anglo-Franco divide here, it appears: 74 percent of anglophones between the ages of 18 and 29 said that “people their age just wanted to hookup” but only 57 percent of the francophones of the same age group. (Over 50 percent of all the 30-39s, over 40 percent of the 40-49s etc.)
At the same time, 87 percent of single participants of all ages agreed with the statement “I would rather date someone I like or love than just hookup with someone casually.” Whereas the respondents largely agree that the culture and other people favour hookups with no strings attached, most of them also state not me. Another complicating factor that Dr Fetner identifies is that there is no clear distinction in anyone’s mind between casual hookups and the sexual connections that lead to romance and relationships. Eighty percent of single participants also agreed with the statement “people my age want to date someone and be in a relationship”, including three-fourths of the 18-29 cohort. It’s a right mess, and no wonder people like Perry, Emba et al. argue that hookup culture is making everyone unhappy, especially women.
Previously on Long Play: Louise Perry and Christine Emba on why “sexual revolution failed women”
How did you meet your partner question, with the In Person / Digital / Other choices reveals that Canadians still mostly find partners in person rather than online. (To anyone who’s tried online dating this will not come as a shock.) There is a gay-straight disparity here in that the same-sex couples have a higher percentage of meeting online - 40 percent for gay men, 30 percent for lesbians. Even so, the LGB people too mostly find partners through analog connections or by going to bars and events.
Among the participants in a relationship, 89 percent described it as monogamous and another 5 percent that they had not discussed the matter with the partner. 6 percent of people described their relationship as “open”. There’s a further breakdown of those results along the Gender and Sexual Identity lines, and within the monogamous group if the monogamy is uncontested or if it’s monogamish.
Love and emotional connection still largely matter:
It’s usually presumed that this primarily goes for women - wrongly, it turns out. 69 percent of men and 71 percent of women said that their most recent encounter had been either “somewhat” or “very” emotionally intimate. It’s the sexual orientation that introduces some variance, but not hugely: 54 percent of gay men reported recent emotionally intimate sex vs over 70 percent of straight men, straight women and bisexual women. (Lesbians were at about 68 percent.)
This dispatch is getting too long so I’ll just rush through a few highlights before I wrap up.
Canadians love cuddling, turns out. (Was it easy to predict? Not sure… I think on average Canucks are a bit colder and less tactile as a people than the Yankees, but that’s anecdotal, don’t yell at me.) 80 percent reported kissing with other sexual behaviours and 69 percent cuddling. There’s a breakdown of those findings along gender and orientation lines. The subsequent chapter “What Are We Doing in the Bedrooms” goes into the finer details of the sexual menu, which I must skip or this email won’t pass a single spam detection filter.
From the “Pleasure, Pain and Risk” chapter, I’ll just highlight the predictable coincidence between closeness to the partner and the amount of pleasure an encounter with them brings (vs strangers or people we know only a little), with some differences between men and women, and differences to do with age and state of health.
For the final chapter, the sociologist added further variables to all the results: post-secondary education, language and culture, Quebec vs. the ROC, provincial differences within the ROC, religious affiliation, political leanings. Comedians could do worse than mine in this section for potential standup material…